


Shots Fired

by Enterprisingly



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, talking it out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 01:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1167045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enterprisingly/pseuds/Enterprisingly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean has been holding onto his complicated, undefined feelings for his dead best friend, without actually dealing with them, for far too long and it's becoming a problem. Eren should probably have taken some lessons in sensitivity before bringing up the subject, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shots Fired

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Narrendor](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Narrendor).



> Manga canon compliant up to chapter 50/51. Unbeta'd. If you spot any errors, please point them out. Narrendor asked me to write this ages ago and I only just got around to doing it.
> 
> This story contains occasional imagined self harm. Just a heads up.

“You’re in love with Marco and everyone here can see it except for you.” The words hit Jean like a punch to the gut and set his world spinning dangerously off it’s axis. All around him, there is a sudden cacophony of choking and the clattering of dropped cutlery as everyone at the dinner table registers what has just been said. 

Jean is not okay right now. He hasn’t been okay in a long time anyway, but this? This is a special kind of Not Okay.

It is, of course, completely Eren’s fault.

Mostly.

Sort of.

If Jean is being honest with himself (which he usually avoids at any cost), the state that he’s in presently could be blamed just as fully on his own personal short-comings as Eren’s. But because he has never been the type to be honest with himself, he is currently laying the blame for all of his troubles squarely at the feet of anyone but himself, which at the moment includes Eren Jeager, and of course, Marco Bodt. Selfish, heartless Marco, who went and died and left Jean with nothing but complicated emotions that he is woefully unequipped to handle, and Eren fucking Jaeger who has cornered him at the dinner table and doesn’t know when to stop talking.

So yeah. Jean fucking hates both of them. But especially Marco. He hates him and resents him and misses him like a severed limb. Sometimes Jean can hardly breathe for missing him, because every breath is a reminder that Marco is dead. He’s fucking gone and Jean is still there. What little light was left is his miserable world has gone out and the worst part is, Jean is too afraid of what he might uncover if he really did some soul searching, to figure out why that is.

Marco was his best friend, but this doesn’t feel like the loss of a friendship. This feels like the sharp sting of losing the better half of his soul. The profound agony of a knife in his heart and he doesn’t fucking know why.

The icing on the shit cake of Jean’s reality is, of course, that Eren fucking Jaeger seems to think that _he_ understands, which can’t possibly be right. To admit that Eren is right, about this of all things, would be unthinkable. Bad enough to concede anything to the brat, but this… no that would simply be too much.

Jean cannot be in love with Marco, because the universe- heartless and unfair as it is- simply cannot have that much capacity for cruelty left after all that is has inflicted upon Jean. It doesn’t matter than the cards have been stacked against him and the rest of humanity since day one, that there are monsters on their doorsteps and amongst their comrades; surely the one indignity that Jean could expect to be spared is only realizing what he could maybe have had with Marco, after it is no longer an option, thanks to Eren Jeagar.

The asshole is leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed lazily over his chest.

“Eren, stop it!” Mikasa hisses at him and shakes his shoulder, but he brushes her hand away, and pushes onwards despite her protest.

“You can try to lie about it all you want, Jean,” he taunts, “but we all know I’m right; I think you know it too, even if you don’t want to believe it. It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn sad; but sooner or later you’re going to have to grow up and admit to yourself that you are in love with a dead man and deal with what that means.”

Jean’s fists are clenching and he can feel his face burning hot with humiliation, even as the cold sweat of rage drips down his spine. None of the other squad mates in the dining room even has the decency to pretend to ignore the drama unfolding before their eyes. Fucking voyeurs, every last one of them.

“You shut your goddamn mouth right now if you have any idea what’s good for you, Eren.” Jean grinds out through clenched teeth.

Eren _laughs_.

“Is that literally all you’ve got? _’Shut your mouth, Eren’_? God, I don’t even recognize you any more. You used to actually _be_ someone, even if that person was kind of a selfish, lazy asshole. Now you’re just…” He gestures limply in Jean’s direction, “nothing. It’s like when Marco died, he took the better half of you with him.” Eren raises an eyebrow sardonically. “Maybe he should have taken all of you, huh? What do you think, Jean? Would you have liked it better if you and he had burned together on the funeral pyre?”

“Stop talking!” There’s a roaring sound in Jean’s ears and he feels like he’s going to be sick.

“Or what? What is a walking ghost going to do to me? You don’t even have what it takes to fight me properly any more. You’ve had one foot in the grave since Marco died, so why are you still here? Why are you still bothering to keep up this act when we both know that you’d rather be-”

Jean slams his fists into the table, propelling himself to his feet. The chair he was sitting in is shoved backwards by the motion and collides with the wall behind him.

“I’m here, in this festering fuckup of a war because that’s what Marco would have wanted! He would have wanted me to keep on fighting this shitty fight until the very end because he was the kind of disgustingly good person who beyond reason or logic, managed to believe that there was something greater than our individual lives and it was worth protecting! So that’s why I’m here risking my god damned life with all of you assholes, all day, every day in a fight that we have almost no chance of winning.”

There’s a moment of deafening silence in the dining room. The entire squad is frozen in place, afraid to even breathe lest the tension in the room finally reach critical levels and annihilate them all.

“But why does he matter so much to you that you’d throw everything away on a cause that you don’t fully believe in? You could have gone to the Military Police and lived a comfortable life just like you’d planned, but you didn’t. Why did you give up all of that for the ideals of a dead man?” Eren asks, voice suddenly softer, devoid of the earlier taunting.

Jean looks at the table, his fists clenched tight and white, pressing into the wood grain surface, his mostly untouched dinner, and the sharp knife resting besides the plate. For a second he imagines grabbing the knife and stabbing himself in the chest, stabbing Eren in the chest, or even going back in time and stabbing Marco in the chest before he could ever becomes someone important, someone who snuck over all his defenses and changed Jean’s world. But one is potentially painful instead of fatal, another pointless, and the third impossible.

He forces his hands to relax, and watches the blood flow back into his fingers.

“I may not believe in this war the way some of you do, but I believed in Marco. I’m in the Scouting Legion because of him, because he told me that I was a good person and when he said it, I believed him. All of this is going to kill me someday, just like it killed him, but I’ll be damned if I don’t take out enough titans for the both of us before I go… I couldn’t face him if I did anything less.”

Jean looks up, eyes flicking around the room, bypassing the stunned faces of the majority of his squad mates, to finally meet Eren’s even stare. There is a gleam of something that looks like pity in Eren’s eyes and yeah, that’s pretty much the last straw for Jean. He turns away, heading for the door. The only thing worse than Eren taunting him would be Eren pitying him. He’d rather go toe to toe with a titan, bare handed, than stick around for the rest of this meal.

“Fuck this, I’m out.”

In the background Connie is reprimanding Sasha for diving across the table to retrieve Jean’s abandoned plate before he’s even fully left the room, and everyone is whispering frantically at each other. The noise follows Jean down the hallway, but it barely register at all.

The keep is suffocating him, and the enclosed space threatens to swallow him whole, so he makes his way out to the stables, climbs up through the hayloft window and up onto the roof. Up high, where the wind is cool and clean and they sky, painted with the colors of the setting sun, stretches endlessly above him in all directions, Jean begins to relax again. For a few precious moments he just sits on the roof, letting his legs dangle over the edge, and breathes.

He’s not really surprised to hear the sounds of someone else invading his sanctuary- his less than graceful departure from dinner was pretty much a guarantee that someone would be sent to check on him, probably someone harmless like Armin- but Jean tenses all the same.

“I… ah… Mikasa told me that I was a dick back there and probably could have handled everything better.” The fact that it’s Eren who came is surprising.

“No shit.” Jean mutters, staring fixedly ahead.

“I should probably work on that. I guess I just thought that… I dunno… it was time for you to deal with your issues too, and I couldn’t really think of any other way to get you to actually open up. I mean, that’s part of why we’re all hiding out here, isn’t it? To get our shit in order so that we can actually stand a chance against the titans in the future? This seemed like the best time to get stuff like this out in the open.” Eren walks across the roof and drops down into a sitting position to Jean’s left, letting his legs hang off the edge as well.

Jean would shove him off the roof if he thought it would actually do any good, but Eren is pretty resilient thanks to his freaky titan superpowers so it would just result in a lot of yelling and probably Jean getting into trouble. As satisfying as it would be, it’s just not worth it. Jean would still be maybe/maybe not in love with someone dead and gone and Eren would still be getting on his nerves.

Instead, he snorts indignantly. “A: it’s not really your place to decide that kind of shit because you’re not our squad leader and you’re not in charge of out lives, B: my personal issues are not your fucking problem, and C: you chose to do this at the fucking dinner table? Really?”

Eren sighs. “Look, I was trying to do what I thought was best for you and the squad as a whole, not as a leader but as a member of the team. And before you get all pissed off again and start ranting about how this is nobody’s business but yours, it became our business the second we started trusting you to defend our backs. Privacy is a nice idea and all but I don’t trust someone who wants to die to keep me alive.” 

There is no malice behind the statement but it still stings. Jean narrows his eyes at Eren. “I’ve been nothing but competent from day one. Nothing that happened with Marco has changed that at all.”

“That’s not true and you know it. Everyone watched you change after Marco died and all of us have seen what your unrequited love affair with a ghost has done to you. If you don’t work this out, it’s only a mater of time before you decide that life just isn’t worth it any more and you throw yourself to the titans or eat your own gun. You love him and he’s gone. Trust me, I get it.” Eren stares off into the distance, with eyes cold, hard, and filled with memory. “There isn’t a single one of us who hasn’t lost someone we loved, the difference is that the rest of us are either coping with it or using that loss to keep ourselves strong. You’re using it as a form of slow suicide.”

Those last words drive the fight inspired by the earlier ones, right out of Jean. As much as it pains him to admit, Eren is right, about some things, anyway. What he feels for Marco has no convenient label, it is a mess of longing, affection, friendship, and the possibility of something deeper, cut short and crushed under layers of repression, in a horrifically ineffective effort to dull the pain. And it's eating him alive.

As Eren had pointed out, everyone in the Scouting Legion knew some form of loss as ruinous as his own, but unlike the rest of his squad mates, Jean is stuck; unable to move on or turn his feelings into something productive. More shameful though, is that Jean had forgotten that he is only one amongst thousands of the walking wounded, willfully ignoring the fact that his peers have lost just as many- if not more -important people than he has over the corse of this war, in favor of wallowing in his own misery. And for the first time he understands why Eren said what he did. 

He blinks, like a dreamer waking from a long sleep. Deep inside of him, Jean feels something shift and the ache that has been his constant companion, since Marco’s death, eases just a little.

“Maybe I love him, maybe I don’t, maybe I can’t even tell because I don’t know shit about love in the first place, and maybe I'm just not ready to go there yet,” Jean begins, “but I do know that Marco was better and brighter than I will ever be and for some reason he liked me and thought that I was worth his time anyway. That is more than anyone has given me before and more than anyone will probably ever give me in the future. The one good thing in _my_ fucked up world is gone. But peace, a bright future for mankind, and all the other stuff that _he_ believed in... even if I don't know if they are possible, I'll still fight for them because he trusted me to help keep them alive. It's the least that I owe him.”

Jean lapses into silence and the corners of Eren's mouth lift, just slightly, but he does not reply; everything that needs to be said has been said. For the first time ever, Eren and Jean sit together in amicable silence and watching the moon come up, bright and full, over the horizon. And in that moment, Jean thinks that maybe he's going to be okay.


End file.
